Tuesday, October 31, 2017

The Narth

Sorry I didn't paint a picture like, I don't know what they look like.

Extruding across the barrier separating their dimension from our own as if between panes of sliding, shattering glass, the limbs of the Narth penetrate our space as if across a fold or crack in the geometry of thin air. At present they are only experimenting—the humans they take are frequently returned to our space, but inscrutably reassembled. A man in Shanghai can hear anything but names, a priest in Nairobi has a copy of two-thirds of his own torso on his back and another man’s left arm, a mother of five in Marseilles can only move at right angles to lines of latitude, a teacher in Wales only exists at dawn. They have begun to experiment with communication, but lack a concept of grammar, linear time or pain: many human subjects have been returned only able to speak the 38 words that form the Narth’s message, but with no awareness that the words are important, that they go in any specific order, or that this was done on purpose or that they shouldn’t have been committed to the hospitals they’re in for these hallucinations. If decoded, the message appears to be offering 8 nucleic acid analogues and 3 new prime numbers in exchange for 582 higher quality test specimens.

Insinuation: The Narth emerge from bends in spacetime, appearing as if stepping around straight, invisible corners in mid air. For practical purposes, this is teleportation with unlimited range, although the majority of any Narth’s body will remain in its home plane, effectively anchoring it to one spot until it retracts and extrudes somewhere else, like a giant squid reaching out from a sideways sea. The limbs themselves are between 3 and 15 feet long.

Gestural detection: Due to the way Narth space intersects our space, while the Narth are in their own space they can detect continuities of gesture but not of space, time or visual appearance on ours. Essentially what this means is is their field of view onto our dimension can only take in individuals moving exactly the same way on the same planet at any given time. If the Narth focus (for example) on a woman in Iowa making a fist with her left hand, the observing Narth will not see anyone near her or the environment she stands in, but they will see anyone else making a fist in the same way at any time anywhere on Earth throughout history. (Their experiments are therefore biased toward dancers, soldiers and those fluent in sign language.) It is very easy for the Narth to detect identical machines this way. When extruded into human space they operate only by touch.

Dimensional Gap: If a human is pulled into Narth space after an insinuation, they will experience it as an excruciatingly slow-moving collage of dissolving black abstractions punctuated by electric bursts of pain. The Narth generally return a subject within 50 hours, but the victim will experience it has having taken years. Check against a 9 or lose a point of Calm and Check vs a 4 or lose a point of Toughness.